The full programme book (PDF) - Royal Geographical Society

T7
ARAMACC: Advancing the use of annually-resolved and absolutely-dated
palaeoceanographic records for the north Atlantic region
P.G.Butler 1 *, C. Andersson 2 , T. Brey 3 , M. Carroll 4 , P. Freitas 5 , J. Hartley 6 , M. Peharda 7 ,
B.R.Schöne 8 , J.D.Scourse 1 , J. Thebault 9 , A.D.Wanamaker 10 , R. Witbaard 11 , E. Zorita 12
1 School of Ocean Sciences, Bangor University, Menai Bridge, Wales
2 Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway
3 Alfred-Wegener-Institut, Bremerhaven, Germany
4 Akvaplan-niva, Fram Centre for Climate and Environment, Tromsø, Norway
5 Laboratório Nacional de Energia e Geologia, Amadora, Portugal
6 Hartley Anderson Ltd, Aberdeen, Scotland
7 Institute of Oceanogtaphy and Fisheries, Split, Croatia
8 Instute of Geosciences, University of Mainz, Germany
9 Laboratoire des sciences de l’environment marin, University of Brest, Plouzané, France
10 Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences, Iowa State University, USA
11 Netherlands Institute for Sea Research, Texel, Netherlands
12 Instute for Coastal Research, Holmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Germany
While the ‘typical’ Quaternary event – if there is such a thing - is the large-scale glacialinterglacial
transition, it can be argued that the most important event, whose study has the
greatest relevance to modern human society, is the experiment that we are, perhaps
unwittingly, carrying out with the Earth’s climate right now. Because our experiment is
occurring during an interglacial (a period of relatively low background variability), the
techniques required to study it necessitate a step change in the resolution – both spatial
and temporal – with which we can measure and reconstruct palaeo-environments. Here
we describe an important forthcoming project to study change in the climatically important
north Atlantic ocean at very high resolution.
The temperate north Atlantic region is home to some of the longest-lived animals known to
science. These are species of bivalve mollusc (Arctica islandica and Glycymeris
glycymeris) that preserve a record of their growth in distinctive annual banding in their
shells. Synchronous growth within populations provides prima facie evidence that the
shell growth is a response to common environmental forcing. It also allows the shells to
be cross dated back in time, like tree-rings, so that absolute dates can be ascribed to
subfossil shells taken from seabed lags. This makes available archives of carbonate
material that can be geochemically analysed and used for high resolution environmental
reconstruction and model comparisons. These archives have multiple applications
including: (a) constraining coupled climate models and biogeochemically capable
hydrodynamic models; (b) providing long baseline data for monitoring the effects of shelf
sea infrastructure; and (c) offering a detailed and precisely dated window into the history
of the north Atlantic. In this poster we introduce a new project (ARAMACC: Annually
Resolved Archives of MArine Climate Change), funded under the EU FP7 Marie Curie
Initial Training Network scheme. The principle goal of ARAMACC is the construction of a
network of shell-based marine proxy archives for the northeast Atlantic ocean and the use
of geochemical analyses (stable oxygen and carbon isotopes) of the absolutely dated
material to obtain proxy information about recent (past few hundred years) changes in
north Atlantic oceanography with very high spatial and temporal resolution. In addition,
ARAMACC researchers will (i) investigate the environmental drivers of shell growth, (ii)
work on the development of new proxy archives, (iii) develop methods to apply the shell
archives to climate modelling, and (iv) develop applications for the commercial and
regulatory sectors.
Keywords: sclerochronology; bivalves; north Atlantic ocean; marine climate; Holocene;
palaeoceanography; Arctica islandica